So called local area networks (LAN) are established in many environments nowadays. For example, a LAN may be established in residences, schools, and office buildings for interconnecting devices, such as computers, through the LAN and in that manner enabling efficient communication between the devices belonging to the LAN. The LAN may technically be implemented in a wired or wireless manner. An example of the wired LAN technology may be Ethernet whereas Wi-Fi represents an example of the wireless LAN technology.
The local area networks are connected to a communication network through a gateway device, which is typically some kind of a router or a modem device. The gateway device implements networking functions and, thus, delivers data packets between the networks. Further, the gateway device may be configured to implement so called private local area network, but also so called public local area network simultaneously. One difference between these two is that an access to network addresses, such as IP addresses, in the private LAN are restricted, but there are no similar restrictions in the public LAN and any device capable of implementing the communication protocol of the LAN in question may access to the public LAN.
One pretty challenging and time consuming task is to couple a device to LAN. This is especially true if the device is such that there is no sophisticated user interface available and the local area network is implemented with a wireless technology, such as Wi-Fi. One solution for the above described situation is so called WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) in which a connection of a device to the Wi-Fi is triggered with a predetermined operation in both the device itself but also the gateway device implementing the local area network. The triggering methods are either so called push-button configuration in which the connection and data encryption if any are initiated by pushing a dedicated WPS button in both of the entities, i.e. the device and the gateway device. An alternative triggering method is utilization of near field communication in the WPS wherein the entities are brought near to each other and necessary information for allowing the device to access the LAN is exchanged over the near field communication.
As may be seen there exists some solutions for bringing a device to the local area network, but they are either cumbersome to implement or insecure by nature. Thus, there is need to develop new solutions which at least partly alleviate the drawbacks of the existing solutions especially in the local area networks implemented with wireless technology.